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Monday, August 06, 2007

The Ugly Truth About Canadian Health Care

If you need to be reminded why Blagojevich's dream universal health care is such a nightmare, just look to our North. The ugly truth is that Canada's health care system is headed back towards privatization, as the Summer 2007 City Journal shows:

Another sign of transformation: Canadian doctors, long silent on the health-care system’s problems, are starting to speak up. Last August, they voted Brian Day president of their national association. A former socialist who counts Fidel Castro as a personal acquaintance, Day has nevertheless become perhaps the most vocal critic of Canadian public health care, having opened his own private surgery center as a remedy for long waiting lists and then challenged the government to shut him down.

“This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week,” he fumed to the New York Times, “and in which humans can wait two to three years.” And now even Canadian governments are looking to the private sector to shrink the waiting lists.

Day’s clinic, for instance, handles workers’-compensation cases for employees of both public and private corporations. In British Columbia, private clinics perform roughly 80 percent of government-funded diagnostic testing. In Ontario, where fealty to socialized medicine has always been strong, the government recently hired a private firm to staff a rural hospital’s emergency room.

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The Ugly Truth About Canadian Health Care

If you need to be reminded why Blagojevich's dream universal health care is such a nightmare, just look to our North. The ugly truth is that Canada's health care system is headed back towards privatization, as the Summer 2007 City Journal shows:

Another sign of transformation: Canadian doctors, long silent on the health-care system’s problems, are starting to speak up. Last August, they voted Brian Day president of their national association. A former socialist who counts Fidel Castro as a personal acquaintance, Day has nevertheless become perhaps the most vocal critic of Canadian public health care, having opened his own private surgery center as a remedy for long waiting lists and then challenged the government to shut him down.

“This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week,” he fumed to the New York Times, “and in which humans can wait two to three years.” And now even Canadian governments are looking to the private sector to shrink the waiting lists.

Day’s clinic, for instance, handles workers’-compensation cases for employees of both public and private corporations. In British Columbia, private clinics perform roughly 80 percent of government-funded diagnostic testing. In Ontario, where fealty to socialized medicine has always been strong, the government recently hired a private firm to staff a rural hospital’s emergency room.